any of certain silvery, chiefly marine food fishes, family Osmeridae, closely related to salmon and trout and found in cold northern waters. Smelts, like trout, have a small, adipose (fleshy) fin. They are slender carnivores and spawn short distances upstream, in the surf or in ponds....

process by which a metal is obtained, either as the element or as a simple compound, from its ore by heating beyond the melting point, ordinarily in the presence of oxidizing agents, such as air, or reducing agents, such as coke. The first metal to be smelted in the ancient Middle East was probably copper (by 5000 bc), followed by tin, lead, and silver. To achieve the high temperatur...

The scarcity of coking coals for blast-furnace use and the high cost of coke ovens are two reasons for the emergence of this other alternative iron-making process. Smelting reduction employs two units: in the first, iron ore is heated and reduced by gases exiting from the second unit, which is a smelter-gasifier supplied with coal and oxygen. The partially reduced ore is then smelted in the......

king of ancient Egypt (1070–44 bce), founder of the 21st dynasty (1075–c. 950 bce), who established the capital at Tanis, in the northeast Nile River delta, while high priests of Amon ruled Thebes and Upper Egypt....

king (reigned 1335–32 bce) of the 18th dynasty (1539–1292 bce) of ancient Egypt, probably in coregency with Akhenaton, his predecessor, for most of the period. Smenkhkare’s origin and identity remain among the unresolved issues of the Amarna period....

...election was a major upset. The presidency was a largely ceremonial role, but many Slovaks feared that a victory for Fico would have concentrated too much power in the hands of his party, Direction (Smer), which already controlled the majority of the seats in the parliament....

novella by Leo Tolstoy, published in Russian as Smert Ivana Ilyicha in 1886, considered a masterpiece of psychological realism. The protagonist’s crisis is remarkably similar to that of Tolstoy himself as described in Ispoved (1884; My Confession)....

novella by Leo Tolstoy, published in Russian as Smert Ivana Ilyicha in 1886, considered a masterpiece of psychological realism. The protagonist’s crisis is remarkably similar to that of Tolstoy himself as described in Ispoved (1884; My Confession)....

Belgian-born Jesuit missionary whose pioneering efforts to Christianize and pacify Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River made him their beloved “Black Robe” and cast him in the role of mediator in the U.S. government’s attempt to secure their lands for settlement by whites....

Lithuanian statesman and journalist who in 1919 became the first president of Lithuania and later returned to power as an authoritarian head of state for the last 13 years of his country’s independence....

The smew (M. albellus) is a small, compact merganser with a short bill; it breeds from Scandinavia to Siberia and south to Turkestan and winters on lakes and streams south to the Mediterranean and Central Asia....

...inflation has been particularly low in France. A minimum wage law has been in effect since 1950, and since 1970 it has been supplemented by a provision known as the salaire minimum interprofessionel de croissance (SMIC; general and growth-indexed minimum wage), which has increased the lowest salaries faster than the inflation rate. Its level is set......

...grain beetles)Closely related to Cucujidae; some feed on grain (Oryzaephilus); another genus, Silvanus.Family SmicripidaeSometimes placed in Nitidulidae; a few species in tropical America; example Smicrips.Family Sphindidae.....

...wolności (1960; “The First Day of Freedom”; filmed 1965), he reflected on the conflict between human freedom and historical necessity. His last play, Śmierć gubernatora (1961; “Death of a Governor”), examined the ethics of the capitalist world, to which Kruczkowski compared the humanitarian principles of the......

...activities.” After the trial court granted summary judgment to the defendants—but before the Michigan Court of Appeals had heard the case—the Michigan Supreme Court held in Smigel v. Southgate Community School District that agency shops in the public sector were prohibited by state law. Accordingly, the Court of Appeals remanded Warczak’s case to the trial......

...off the Polish Corridor from East Prussia and Pomerania, while General Gerd von Rundstedt’s more powerful southern army corps drove across the border from Silesia and Slovakia. Polish Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz tried vainly to defend Poland’s industrial regions along the frontier, increasing his army’s vulnerability to Blitzkrieg. German tanks quickly burst into the rear,......

city, southern Ukraine. It lies on the north bank of the main Danube distributary some 50 miles (80 km) from the Black Sea. In the late 14th century it was the Slavic settlement of Smil. It was captured in 1484 by the Turks, who fortified it and held it until 1812. It was a Russian possession from 1812 to 1856, when the Turks retook it; it reverted to Russia during 1878–1918. Be...

city, Ukraine, on the Tyasmyn (Tiasmyn) River. The city was first established as a Cossack settlement in the late 16th century. In 1793 it came under Russian rule, and in the 19th century it became a significant sugar-refining centre. In the 20th century it developed a large food industry and railway-servicing and engineering industries. Pop. (2001) 69,681; (2005 est.) 69,023....

Smilacaceae, or the greenbrier family, with 315 species in two genera (Smilax and Heterosmilax), is the second largest family in the order. These herbaceous or woody climbers are found around the world. Rhipogonum, another twiner from Australia and New Guinea, was formerly included in Smilacaceae but has been assigned its own family, Rhipogonaceae....

...are clusters of white or greenish white flowers, which are followed by red berries. The leaves form two rows along the upper part of the stem. Similar plants of the genus Smilacina, known as false Solomon’s seal, bear their flower clusters at the tips of the stems....

...relative of spikenard, are used as a substitute for sarsaparilla flavouring. Smilacina racemosa, one of the false Solomon’s seals in the family Liliaceae (order Liliales), is sometimes called wild spikenard....

Sept. 27, 1916Rehovot, British-mandated Palestine [now in Israel]Aug. 21, 2006Meishar, IsraelIsraeli writer and scholar who was one of Israel’s earliest and most richly lyrical Hebrew novelists. Although Yizhar was a devout Zionist, he did not shy away from portraying the painful and often ...

genus of plants in the family Smilacaceae, consisting of about 300 species of woody or herbaceous vines, variously known as catbriers and greenbriers, native to tropical and temperate parts of the world. The stems of many species are covered with prickles; the lower leaves are scalelike; and the leathery upper leaves have untoothed blades with three to nine large veins. The white or yellow-green ...

...by power as his opponents. The film earned critical praise, and the screenplay by Jeremy Larner won an Academy Award. Ritchie continued to explore the downside of competition with Smile (1975), a broad satire on another facet of American life, the teenage beauty pageant. Bruce Dern played a smarmy pageant judge, Barbara Feldon was a megalomaniacal director, and Michael....

The newborn baby can turn his head and eyes toward and away from visual and auditory stimuli, signaling interest and alarm, respectively. Smiling during infancy changes its meaning over the first year. The smiles that newborns display during their first weeks constitute what is called reflex smiling and usually occur without reference to any external source or stimulus, including other people.......

...Gettin’ in over My Head, with contributions from McCartney, Eric Clapton, and Elton John. The landmark work of this period in Brian’s career, however, was Smile (2004), finally offered to the world as a completed solo album after Brian had spent nearly four decades fine-tuning its sound; a boxed set of the original ......

In 1955 Bergman had his first great international success with Sommernattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night), a bittersweet romantic comedy-drama in a period setting. In the next few years, a kind of Bergman fever swept over the international film scene: concurrently with the succession of his new films, which included two masterpieces, ......

Scottish author best known for his didactic work Self-Help (1859), which, with its successors, Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880), enshrined the basic Victorian values associated with the “gospel of work.”...

...date in December 1966. Exhausted and depressed, Brian went into seclusion as the rest of the band cobbled remains of the abortive album into a tuneful but tentative release titled Smiley Smile (1967)....

The newborn baby can turn his head and eyes toward and away from visual and auditory stimuli, signaling interest and alarm, respectively. Smiling during infancy changes its meaning over the first year. The smiles that newborns display during their first weeks constitute what is called reflex smiling and usually occur without reference to any external source or stimulus, including other people.......

This figure, which has variously been called El Lanzón, the Great Image, and the Smiling God, is thought to have been the chief object of worship in the original temple. The southern arm of the temple was subsequently twice widened by rectangular additions, into which some of the original galleries were prolonged. After the second addition, the two were joined by a freestanding facade......

One Lubitsch film that was a box-office success was The Smiling Lieutenant (1931). Nominated for an Academy Award as best picture, this musical, set in 19th-century Vienna, starred Chevalier, Claudette Colbert, and Miriam Hopkins. Among the contributors to the screenplay was Samson Raphaelson, who would collaborate frequently with Lubitsch throughout the director’s......

...for their vigour and skillful technique. John was greatly influenced by the work of Old Master painters, especially Peter Paul Rubens, as can be seen in the strong and sensuous Smiling Woman (c. 1908), a portrait of John’s second wife, Dorelia. John was known as a colourful personality who adopted an individualistic and bohemian lifestyle. Intrigued by gypsy culture....

Colman was a pupil of Asher Durand in New York City and from 1860 to 1862 studied in Spain, Italy, France, and England. In 1871–76 he was again in Europe. With James D. Smillie, he founded the American Water Color Society (1866), becoming its first president. His own watercolour paintings are particularly fine. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Design in 1862. Among his......

The family Adapidae and the related Notharctidae contain two North American genera, Notharctus and Smilodectes, which are well represented in the fossil deposits of the Bridger Basin, Wyoming, U.S., and Adapis, Europolemur, Anchomomys, and Pronycticebus from Europe. Notharctus and Smilodectes are not thought to be antecedent to living......

In 1747 Binnya Dala succeeded Smim Htaw Buddhaketi, who had seven years earlier been set up as king of the Mon in the new capital of Pegu after their successful revolt against the Burmans. Binnya Dala, who was his predecessor’s chief minister and a more capable military leader, made numerous raids into northern Myanmar, penetrating beyond Ava, the capital. In 1751 he raised a large army for the......

The diets of marsupials are as varied as the niches they occupy. Many dasyurids live chiefly on insects and other small animals. Dunnarts (Sminthopsis) are so hyperactive—like shrews—that, in order to supply their high energy needs, they must devour their own weight in food (chiefly insects) each day. The numbat uses its remarkable wormlike tongue to lap up termites and ants.......

They subsist on insects and small vertebrates, although the broad-footed marsupial mice (Antechinus species) are also known to eat nectar. The fat-tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata) stores excess fat in its tail. Members of all genera except Antechinus will go into torpor when food is scarce. The crest-tailed marsupial mouse, or mulgara (Dasycercus......

...in large numbers on snow surfaces. Springtails live in soil and on water and feed on decaying vegetable matter, sometimes damaging garden crops and mushrooms. The small (2 mm long), green-coloured lucerne flea (Sminthurus viridis), one of the most common species, is a serious pest to crops in Australia. When necessary, insecticides are used to control springtails. Fossil springtails are....

...19th century. One of the earliest was William Wilkins’s Downing College, Cambridge (1806–11), with details closely copied from the Erechtheum on the Acropolis at Athens. Following this were Sir Robert Smirke’s Covent Garden Theatre (1809), London’s first Greek Doric building; Wilkins’s Grange Park, Hampshire (1809), a monumental attempt to cram an English country house into the form of......

The first trial opened in August 1936, while Genrikh G. Yagoda was head of the secret police. The main defendants were Grigory Yevseyevich Zinovyev, Lev Borisovich Kamenev, and Ivan Smirnov, all of whom had been prominent Bolsheviks at the time of the October Revolution (1917) and during the early years of the Soviet regime. With 13 codefendants they were accused of having joined Leon Trotsky......

craftsman who fabricates objects out of iron by hot and cold forging on an anvil. Blacksmiths who specialized in the forging of shoes for horses were called farriers. The term blacksmith derives from iron, formerly called “black metal,” and farrier from the Latin ferrum, “iron.”...

American firearms manufacturer based in Springfield, Massachusetts. The partnership was first founded in 1852 by Horace Smith (1808–93) and Daniel B. Wesson (1825–1906) in Norwich, Connecticut, to make lever-action Volcanic repeating handguns firing caseless self-consuming bullets....

...of forgeries ascribed to his alleged father and to Shelley, John Keats, and others. More commonplace is the forgery encountered in the case of the Edinburgh forger A.H. (“Antique”) Smith, who was responsible for forgeries of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Stuart, and other persons from Scottish literature and history—a feat that ultimately earned him 12 months’......

By 1869 Abby and Julia were the only surviving members of the family. In that year, aroused by inequities in local tax rates, they attended a woman suffrage meeting in Hartford, and in 1873 Abby traveled to New York to attend the first meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Women. A month later, at a Glastonbury town meeting, Abby read a spirited protest against the taxation of......

...House. The school remained at the meetinghouse until 1835, when it moved to a new building and became the Smith Primary and Grammar School. Owned by the city, the school had an endowment from Abiel Smith, a wealthy Boston businessman who was an early supporter of the education of black youth....

American first lady (1797–1801), the wife of John Adams, second president of the United States, and mother of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States. She was a prolific letter writer whose correspondence gives an intimate and vivid portrayal of life in the young republic....

U.S. federal law passed in 1940 that made it a criminal offense to advocate the violent overthrow of the government or to organize or be a member of any group or society devoted to such advocacy. The first prosecutions under the Smith Act, of leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), took place in 1941. After World War II the statute was used against the l...

Scottish social philosopher and political economist. After two centuries, Adam Smith remains a towering figure in the history of economic thought. Known primarily for a single work—An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the first comprehensive system of political economy—Smith is more properly regarded as a social philosop...

...Poor, although this was illustrated with drawings partly copied from daguerreotypes by Richard Beard and not actual photos. A later effort, Street Life in London (1877), by Adolphe Smith and John Thomson, included facsimile reproductions of Thomson’s photographs and produced a much more persuasive picture of life among London’s working class. Thomson’s images were......

June 8, 1921Penticton, B.C.June 9, 1993Los Angeles, Calif.(GLADYS SMITH), U.S. actress who was a striking and statuesque leading lady and supporting player in Hollywood during the 1940s and ’50s and made a spectacular splash on Broadway in 1971 with her performance as a cynical aging former...

...in The Cruel Sea (1951). The latter novel became a huge best-seller. His later work included The Story of Esther Costello (1953), The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956), and Smith and Jones (1963), which was based on the 1951 Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean spy defection to the Soviet Union. Life is a Four-Letter Word (2nd ed., 1966, 1970; abridged as......

Nov. 28, 1967 Mexia, TexasFeb. 8, 2007Hollywood, Fla.American celebrity who engaged in a lifestyle that frequently captured tabloid headlines, especially when she married 89-year-old Texas oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II in 1994, at the age of 26. His death 14 months later led to a h...

March 30, 1926Taplow, Buckinghamshire, Eng.July 7, 2014Oxford, Eng.British explorer, writer, and television presenter who chronicled ambitious world adventures in a series of travel memoirs. His best-known expedition, which he undertook in 2011 at age 85, consisted of a 66-day voyage across...

Jan. 18, 1915Toronto, Ont.Feb. 7, 1994TorontoCanadian diplomat who as the first secretary-general of the Commonwealth, organized and coordinated association activities but, more important, demonstrated aplomb while serving (1965-75) as a troubleshooter during several serious crises. During ...

April 1, 1921Clinton, S.C.April 3, 2014Charlotte, N.C.American musician who was a virtuoso guitarist and banjo player who wrote or co-wrote more than 500 compositions that encompassed such genres as country, gospel, and boogie-woogie, but he was indelibly identified as the composer of “Guit...

...his first day of life, much less 84 years. Deprived of a father before birth, he soon lost his mother as well, for within two years she married a second time; her husband, the well-to-do minister Barnabas Smith, left young Isaac with his grandmother and moved to a neighbouring village to raise a son and two daughters. For nine years, until the death of Barnabas Smith in 1653, Isaac was......

Feb. 28, 1945Beaumont, TexasAug. 3, 2011Los Angeles, Calif.American football player and actor who impressed many fans as much for his role as the soft-spoken Moses Hightower in six Police Academy films (1984–89) as he did during his nine seasons (1967–76) as an NFL defensive li...

March 15, 1927Maynardville, Tenn.Jan. 16, 2010Franklin, Tenn.American country music singer who was one of the most popular country music recording stars of the 1950s and ’60s as well as a regular fixture on television, which showcased his polished and handsome appearance, his refined ballad...

city, seat (1872) of Smith county, northern Kansas, U.S. Smith Center is located about 85 miles (135 km) northwest of Salina. It was founded in 1871 by L.T. Reese with the aim of making it the county seat (the county had been named after Major J. Nelson Smith). The economy of Smith Center is based on grain and livestock. The homestead cabin of Brewster Higley,...

Feb. 28, 1945Beaumont, TexasAug. 3, 2011Los Angeles, Calif.American football player and actor who impressed many fans as much for his role as the soft-spoken Moses Hightower in six Police Academy films (1984–89) as he did during his nine seasons (1967–76) as an NFL defensive li...

...the Afrotropical, or Ethiopian, region and the Holarctic is generally drawn somewhere across the Sahara desert (Figure 2). A radical reanalysis of mammal distributions by Charles H. Smith, however, has concluded that the Mediterranean region, including both its southern and northern shores, is actually much more Paleotropical than Holarctic in aspect......

Oct. 27, 1931Letchworth, Hertfordshire, Eng.April 15, 2016Patchogue, N.Y.British painter and printmaker who created bold large-scale abstract paintings, many of which were sculptural three-dimensional constructions. He was particularly known for his three-dimensional “kit...

English novelist and poet, highly praised by the novelist Sir Walter Scott. Her poetic attitude toward nature was reminiscent of William Cowper’s in celebrating the “ordinary” pleasures of the English countryside. Her radical attitudes toward conventional morality (the novel Desmond tells of the innocent love of a man for a married woman) and political ideas of class equality (inspired by t...

American revisionist movement, led by Clarence 13X, which split from the Nation of Islam in 1963. The movement rejected being called a religion, preferring instead to be known as a culture and way of life. Its teachings are referred to as “Supreme Mathematics.”...

Sept. 6, 1948Jersey City, N.J.June 20, 2006Maplewood, N.J.American musician who was the lead guitarist for the group Kool and the Gang, which reached the zenith of its popularity in the 1980s. He was also the author of some of the band’s most memorable songs, including “Joanna” and “Take My...

Dec. 12, 1913Assiniboia, Sask.May 19, 2009North Vancouver, B.C.Canadian hockey player who was a highly skilled centre who, during his 11 seasons (1936–47) in the National Hockey League (NHL), became known for his playmaking ability as well as for his gentlemanly conduct on the ice. Smith pl...